A few weeks ago I wrote a story about Michael Waltrip. His cheating scandal had just been wiped out of the headlines by the photo finish at the Daytona 500, and Waltrip had raced his way into the 500 after not qualifying on time. My story focused on Waltrip's seemingly uncanny luck that has been with him throughout his racing career. I boldly predicted that his luck would continue and he would manage to have a decent season despite his cars performing poorly throughout preseason testing. We are now two months into the Nextel Cup season, and I have to admit that I couldn't have been more wrong. Waltrip has been anything but lucky this year, and things keep getting worse on and off the track. In fact, I think Don Imus and Mike Nifong are the only members of the sporting world having a worse go of it right now and neither are actual athletes.

How bad are things for Michael right now?  Well for starters, he is dead last in the point standings after the first seven races. In fact, everyone in the world is currently ahead of Waltrip in the standings because he has earned a grand total of negative 27 points this year. He has been unable to qualify for a single race since the first week of the season at Daytona and as a result has been unable to overcome the 100-point penalty handed out by NASCAR for using an illegal substance on his carburetor. Being dead last in the standings of any sport is bad enough, but imagine being so bad that you would have been better off having never participated at all.

It must be hard for Waltrip to find any kind of silver lining in his situation because he hasn't even been close to qualifying for the races. He is consistently the slowest car on the practice sheets and backs it up with even slower runs in qualifying. Speed Channel should just use a recording of announcer Larry McReynolds saying, "That means Michael Waltrip will not race this weekend," to save Larry the trouble of saying it every week.

The one time Waltrip was close to qualifying for a race was at California, but he was knocked out of the field by a faster time from David Reutimann, who just happens to be Waltrip's teammate and a driver that Waltrip personally recruited. Talk about adding a little salt to the wound. Last week at Texas, Mother Nature spared Waltrip the misery of another failed qualifying attempt as rain washed out qualifying and kept Michael out of the race. He was the slowest car in practice anyway, so the rain was more likely a blessing than a burden.